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Stealing Harvard

If Harvard has a $35 billion endowment, why should anyone pay $45,600/year to attend? There's lots of reasons, I'm sure, including supply and demand, prestige and the like. But it's comforting to know that it's mostly the government's fault.

On Thursday, the Coalition for Public Safety hosted a briefing, “The Need for Criminal Justice Reform: How Did We Get Here?,” with coordination with the congressional House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Caucus, co-chaired by Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Raul Labrador (R-ID), and Cedric Richmond (D-LA). This briefing highlighted the major policy decisions that have led to a dramatic increase in the federal prison population and serious problems in federal sentencing policies.

Hypocrisy has never been a stranger in the ivory towers of academia, but the latest development among the faculty at Harvard is a particularly delicious bit of irony. It seems that professors, like everyone, don’t much appreciate having to pay higher prices for health insurance. As a result of the Affordable Care Act’s mandates, however, prices are set to rise significantly within the halls of academia.

Minimum wage is set to increase from $6.55 an hour to $7.25 on July 24th. The Wall Street Journal article “Mandating Unemployment, congress prepares to kill more jobs”, from July 13, 2009, raises the question of who this raise will benefit, and who it will hurt. According to the article, David Neumark, an economist from University of California, Irvine, believes “the 70-cent per-hour minimum wage hike this month would kill ‘about 300,000 jobs for those between the ages of 16-24’”. As of June, 2009, 24% of American teens are already unemployed.